Modern Scrum is a certification-laden minefield of detailed practises and roles. To legitimately describe oneself as a Scrum Master or Product Owner involves an expensive two day certification class taught by someone who in turn took an eye-wateringly expensive Scrum Trainer class, from one of the competing factions of “Professional” or “Certified” (but ironically not both) schools of Scrum training. But it was not always so.

What led to the plethora of practises, religion and superstition that surrounds modern “agile” methods? What follows is an amalgam of what may have happened. It is the result of my conversations with a number of early agile practitioners along with my own experiences as both an in-house and contract developer during the 1990s. It is, as they say, “based on real events”.

A long time ago…

The earliest agile projects, or at least those projects whose participants would later describe them as agile…